美国医学专家：武汉华南海鲜市场并非新冠病毒的源头

美国科学家日前进行的一项关于新冠病毒最新研究显示，“武汉不是该病毒的源头”。研究称，这种导致全球大流行的病毒并非来自实验室，而是自然产生的。这种病毒的较弱版本可能已经在人群中传播了数年，甚至几十年。

近日，美国杜兰大学医学院教授罗伯特·加里接受美国广播公司新闻网（ABC News）的采访时表示：新冠病毒并非源于武汉海鲜市场。

In a recent interview with ABC news, Dr. Robert Garry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine, once again pointed out that it's a misconception to believe the virus originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, China.



他认为目前阴谋论在网络上风行，非常有必要利用整个团队的力量来探究这种新型冠状病毒的起源。

"There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level," Dr. Robert Garry told ABC News, "so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin."

ABC News网站：“抱歉，阴谋论者。研究表明，新冠肺炎‘不是实验室构建的’”

“我们的分析以及其他的分析都指向了比那更早的起源。那里肯定有一些病例，但不是新冠病毒的源头。”

"Our analyses, and others too, point to an earlier origin than that," Garry said. "There were definitely cases there, but that wasn't the origin of the virus."


图源：央视网视频截图

采访中，罗伯特·加里提到了科学杂志《自然医学》上发表的一篇研究论文，加里正是作者之一。



研究人员发现，新冠病毒并不具有“之前使用的病毒主干结构”，因此并非人类创造，可能是一种在蝙蝠体内发现的病毒和另一种穿山甲携带的病毒结合发展而成。

Researchers concluded that the novel coronavirus is not a human creation because it does not share any "previously used virus backbone." It likely arose, the study said, from a recombination of a virus found in bats and another virus, possibly originating from pangolins.

新冠病毒与在蝙蝠中发现的冠状病毒有96％的类似性，正是4%的变异解释了为何它有如此高的传染性。

COVID-19 is 96% identical to a coronavirus found in bats, researchers said, but with a certain variation that could explain what has made it so infectious.


图源：CGTN视频截图

加里称，表面蛋白的突变可能是触发这次大流行的原因，但是在积累到目前情况之前，这种病毒的较弱版本也可能已经在人群中传播了数年，甚至几十年。

According to Garry, the pandemic may be triggered by the mutation in surface proteins of the virus. But it's also possible that a less severe version of the illness was circulating through the population for years, perhaps even decades, before escalating to this point.

研究称，新冠病毒不是在实验室中构建的，也不是有目的性的人为操控的病毒（not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus）。

美国国家卫生研究院所长弗朗西斯·柯林斯也支持这篇文章的论点，他在个人博客上称，这项研究证明新冠病毒来源于大自然，信服力很高。

Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, supported the study’s findings, writing on his blog, "This study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19."



据央视网报道，对于新冠肺炎病毒的来源，柯林斯提出了两种构想：

第一种构想是，随着新的冠状病毒在其天然宿主（可能是蝙蝠或穿山甲）中不断进化，其刺突蛋白也随之发生突变，以此来结合与人体中与ACE2蛋白结构相似的分子并感染人体细胞。

According to Dr. Francis Collins, in the first scenario, as the new coronavirus evolved in its natural hosts, possibly bats or pangolins, its spike proteins mutated to bind to molecules similar in structure to the human protein, thereby enabling it to infect human cells.

第二种情况是，这种新型冠状病毒在获得能够引发人类疾病的能力之前，就已经从动物进入到人类。经过自然进化之后，它们最终获得了在人与人之间传播的能力，并可以导致严重疾病。

The second scenario is that the new coronavirus crossed from animals into humans before it became capable of causing human disease. Then, as a result of natural evolution, the virus eventually gained the ability to spread human-to-human and cause diseases.

综合来源：央视网，央视新闻，CGTN，ABC News